Music for the Royal Fireworks
We know you, who
Turn your hands
To Brahms, to meadow
Gold and sand so dark,
To the amber glow
Of summer in the park,
Far away the tempo
Of morning’s fragile lark;
But we know also
How whole the drift
Of truth can feel,
And we know too well
That wings we lift
Above the ordinary sun,
Beyond the endless roar
And limit of the land,
Universes born
Like sparklers in the hand,
Will immerse us in the colors
Of the growing dawn.
April 6th, 2021, Kaiholu
August 4th, 2025, Rosebud
Explanation
George Steiner, with whom I studied poetry at Columbia in 1967, asked in 1961, “Why has the English language turned away from music?” (Steiner’s review of John Hollander’s The Untuning of the Sky, “The Lyre and the Pen,” in The Reporter, Feb. 16, 1961.)
I wrote this poem originally about Handel and to join Steiner’s complaint. I rewrote it after hearing Greg Anderson’s and Liz Roe’s versions of Brahms’ Song of the Lark and Sigur Rós’ Glósolí, which celebrates the sun rising in three blaring chords that finally stamp the sun in the sky.
The notes they adapted around this resurrection raised the music into the sky with the sun, washing everyone in light, and I thought I might try to adapt my earlier poem to echo it.
In this music, the world is transfigured like blown glass onto a higher plane of existence. We have to hope that matter reshapes itself in a growing universe into an ultimate radiance, into Scriabin’s Mysterium, despite the passing limitations of the present.
In Bergson’s creative evolution, the life force washes over us like the sea, as lyrical sensations evolve into metaphysical epiphanies. As Wilbur writes in “On the Marginal Way,”
May that vast motive wash and wash our own.